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World in colour - Colour Photography before 1915

8 May – 27 September 2015

A hundred years ago the French philanthropist Albert Kahn sent twenty photographers to Europe, Asia, Africa and America to document people, landscapes and monuments using the latest techniques of colour photography. In an era when the world’s nations were gearing up to wage the Great War, Kahn, a French banker, launched this major project as a contribution to world peace.

The long-forgotten 72,000 glass plates are today celebrated as milestones in the history of documentary photography. For the first time in Switzerland, Museum Rietberg is showing a selection of this treasury of images, which are fascinating both from an ethnographical point of view and as documents of photographic history. The images permit us a gloriously colourful view of a bygone world that we have hitherto only known in black and white.

Inspired by the ideas of the philosopher and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), Kahn became convinced that only through a knowledge of the world’s cultures and through exchange between them would people be able to live together peacefully. His reasoning was that people who had come to know and respect one another would not go to war. The travelling photographers were instructed to capture local scenes, relaxed everyday situations, people in their typical clothing and uniforms, street views and famous monuments on film. Kahn expected them to produce neither reportage nor art photography nor ethnological field research. Rather, he was interested in the traditional world, local customs and peaceful coexistence of the twentieth century.

The exhibition was conceived and organised by the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn and the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin

With the support of the foundations: René and Susanne Braginsky, Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim, Otto and Régine Heim, Volkart Stiftung